Did you know in advance that one should subscribe to the Stock Advisor and/or Rule Breakers, and ignore the rest?

I did not. Apparently like you, I began with Hidden Gems, a small-cap service. I subscribed to Global Gains, an international stock letter, and a truly god-awful attempt at small-cap value investing called Pay Dirt, which was shut down as soon as its performance stats became embarrassing. Global Gains recommended some of the stocks later implicated in the scandal around fraudulent Chinese companies listed on U.S. exchanges.

The difference between these and the original two is that David Gardner was not an advisor to any of the spinoffs. Tom, the businessman, was the brains behind this product expansion. If you were a dedicated growth investor, a Peter Lynch fan, you were more apt to gravitate toward Stock Advisor, where brothers Tom and David each made one rec per month, and Rule Breakers, which was all David and his team. This is where the tech and futurism were. Hidden Gems' top rec was an industrial company that made commercial cooking equipment.

If the conversation is about growth stock investing, and whether it's possible to consistently beat the market with it, I think SA and RB are objectively the appropriate TMF letters to examine. The proliferation was designed to appeal to other investing niches, which TMF wasn't nearly as good at. In truth, the only great stock picker TMF has produced is David Gardner, but in this business, one is all you need.

I do agree that survival bias has a major, misleading effect on TMF's self-reported returns in its advertising. You add all the dumpstered stuff to the current database and the reported numbers would not be what they are.